Posts Tagged friendlyelec

NanoPi NEO Plus2 is a brand new board released by FriendlyELEC. It’s slightly bigger than the NEO2 board, and packed with much more cool stuff: 1GB RAM, Wifi+Bluetooth module, and 8GB eMMC chip. It has also two USB2.0 port connected to independent USB controllers.

The NanoPi NEO Plus2 Basic Kit accompanies the board with an acrylic enclosure, and the first orders are delivered with an UART USB adapter. They also listed an antenna, but I did not receive it in my kit. Anyway I have a better option, a flat self-adhesive antenna like this one.

The acrylic enclosure is about two times thicker than that for NEO boards, and it also has a hole for antenna mount. I added 8 pieces of M2.5 washers and 4 M3 pillars to the original design, to make it more long-lasting. The photo below has the UART adapter plugged in.

Armbian still needs some work to be done to support this new board. But the Ubuntu image that is available from FriendlyELEC is quite enough to demonstrate all the hardware capabilities. Unlike Armbian, it does not mount /tmp and /var/log as tmpfs, so the SD card may experience a faster wearing.

The NanoPi NEO2 board by FriendlyElec has several options for an enclosure in their webshop. The 3D-printed plastic enclosure is of too poor quality, and it doesn’t fixate the heatsink properly on the CPU.

The acrylic case does not include washers, which makes the whole construct too fragile, as the screws can easily damage the plastic. Also the M2.5 screws for fixing the heatsink are too short.

So, I added the following components to the design:

M3*16mm screws and M3 nuts (4 pieces each)

M3 washers (24 pieces)

Also the following parts came with the acrylic case:

M3*6mm screws (4 pieces)

6.3mm plastic spacers (4 pieces)

25mm female-female M3 spacers (4 pieces)

6mm male-female M3 spacers (4 pieces)

As a result, we get a sturdy case that is able to sustain some rough handling, like carrying it in a toolbox among other hardware.

NanoPi NEO2 by FriendlyElec is a new sub-$20 Linux microcomputer, built on Allwinner H5 SoC, providing a Gigabit Ethernet and USB 2.0 interface. Also additional interfaces are possible via expansion headers (needs some soldering work). The board is equipped with 512MB DDR3 RAM.

It is highly recommended to buy the heatsink alongside with the board. The CPU is heating up quite significantly, and it needs cooling. With “stress -c 4” CPU load test, “armbianmonitor -m” shows the core temperature rising up to 75C. The board sustains long-term load under such conditions. But with a fan, the core temperature drops below 40C, and the power consumption drops significantly too.

The plastic 3D-printed enclosure is of little use. First, it’s quite easy to break when you insert the board. Also it does not fixate the heatsink properly.

So, I ended up in using the original cardboard packaging as a base for the board, just to avoid extra touching of electronic circuits, and to fixate the USB power cable:

Armbian nightly image booted without problems. Up to now, I noticed the following minor problems with it:

All in all, this board looks much more reliable than Orange Pi Zero: it can work for long hours with an USB Wifi dongle, whereas OPI0 was hanging up after few minutes of work (using the same USB power cable and power source and the dongle). UPD: the board doesn’t actually hang up, but the WiFi interface stops transmitting packets for some reason. Needs further investigation.

UPD: I tried to flip the board with the hope for better heat dissipation (below), but it appeared to be much worse, and the peak temperature reached 85C: